BIG TREES BOOSTERISM

Lady standing along the San Lorenzo River near the swinging bridge entrance to Big Trees Grove, circa 1900 - Courtesy of Ross Eric Gibson

"Perhaps the strongest reason for the unlimited popularity of the place [Santa Cruz] as a homesite and a resort, lies in the fact that easily accessible to the beach with its improvements and pleasures are the attractions of the mountains. The giant redwoods with their massive boughs outstretched and surrounded on all sides by more ever green trees are easily seen from the beach as they rise majestically from the wooded heights back of the city. Of romantic and absorbing interest is the drive from the city to the world-famous grove of Big Trees, five miles north. The road follows the cañon of the San Lorenzo the entire distance, leading one through numberless vistas of redwood, pine, manzanita and madroño, growing from brilliant green banks of moss and fern, past rushing streams and springs, around corners from which can be seen, hundreds of feet below, the seething river as it turns sharply in its course, and finally through a ford in the river to the grove itself. There one stands and looks, absorbed and awe-struck, at these monuments, the sequoia sempervirens in all their impressive greatness. 'The Giant' attracts particular attention, being three hundred and six feet high, and over twenty-one feet in diameter. All of the larger trees are named for great Americans – Theodore Roosevelt, General Sherman, General Grant and General Fremont. In the hollow of one, General Fremont is supposed to have once camped."

"This grove can be reached from Santa Cruz every day in the year by train as well as by carriage."

Source: “At Santa Cruz by the Sea,” by H.R. Judah Jr. (Secretary Santa Cruz Board of Trade), Sunset Magazine, June 1907.

 

A TRADITION CONTINUED

Author's Personal Collection

This 1931 plaque was found in Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park. It is believed that it relates to a big tree dedication made to this group when the redwood grove was known as Santa Cruz County Big Trees Park. 

The Junior Order United American Mechanics was originally known as the Union of Workers. It was an anti-Catholic American Nativist organization founded amid the 1844-1845 anti-alien riots in Philadelphia. Members campaigned against the hiring of foreign workers and advocated patronizing only American owned businesses.

The Mechanics were one of the few Nativist organizations which survived after the Civil War. Despite its name, the Mechanics was not a trade union and did not become involved in labor relations. Eventually it evolved into an insurance benefit society for its members.

The March 13, 1931 Fresno Morning Republican contained the following notice ...

"Delegates to the state convention of the Junior Order, United American Mechanics, to be held in San Francisco will assemble at the Big Trees near Santa Cruz on March 15, where at an impressive ceremony one of the giants of the grove will be dedicated to the Junior Order."

The boys' band of San Jose played for the attendees. Unfortunately there is no further information about this tree dedication or the exact location of the tree.

A GIANT AMONG THE BIG TREES

Author's Personal Collection

“When Theodore Roosevelt visited the Big Trees of the Santa Cruz mountains in California, he asked his friends and the guide to retire to a distance, that he might be alone with the Sequoia Sempervirens – the oldest living plant on the earth. They watched him as he lay prone on the ground, and with face to the sky, measured, with his soul, eight thousand years* of continuous life as it stretched away two hundred and seventy feet skyward. When he rejoined his friends there was a conversation about the eternal realities and vigors of life. He had faced the infinite from the altar rail of the finite.”

* The age of the Giant varies from just under 1,000 years to over 2,000. It is believed by some that the Giant sprouted from a seed though most of the big trees we see today in this grove sprang from the roots of existing trees. 

This begs the question: just how old are the root systems of these monarchs of the forest? Answers may come in the near future. In 2019, the genome of the coast redwood was successfully sequenced by scientists from the University of California–Davis and Johns Hopkins University in cooperation with the Save the Redwoods League. This new research reveals the complexity of the coast redwoods and perhaps one day will help reveal the true age of the entire redwood, from roots to tip. 

Source: “Sempervirens, A Christian Training School,” by Alexander C. Stevens, Woman’s Home Missions of the Methodist Episcopal Church, May 1920.

 

KINGS OF THE FOREST

"Sunday we were led to the big trees, not, indeed, the very largest, but large enough to gratify my curiosity. In company of several gentlemen, besides Mr. Joseph Bloch and his family, we took a ride into the mountains, which in scenery and vegetation are like the Sierra Nevada. A winding road cut into the mountain above the [San Lorenzo] River, leads along a terrible precipice upward through a forest of tall, red trees, a species of cedars and thick undergrowth. The precipice of the narrow canyon, pierced by the river, becomes steeper as you ascend, so that you roll on the edge of a perpendicular wall, as it were, 500 to 800 feet high. The horses and the driver do not appear to mind it, for they go as fast as if they were on a level turnpike in Ohio. The narrow gauge railroad is now below and then above you. Where the canyon widens there are powder mills and saw mills, sometimes 500 to 600 feet perpendicularly below you."

Author's Personal Collection

"We have driven seven miles through the forest, the size of the trees always increasing. Now we leave the main road, cross the river and ascend a steep hill and we are among the big trees. I measured one and found the circumference of the base to be seventy-five feet. Their growth is similar to the hickory, tall, straight and without branches, to a height of perhaps fifty to seventy-five feet. Some of these large trees are nearly two hundred feet high. There is an abundance of them on this mountain. Several of them have been burned out at the base to serve as huts for human beings, and in one of them a shoemaker had a regular cabin with windows cut through the body of the tree. There is a regular picnic ground among these trees. Platforms are constructed for the usual purposes, and a family has made its home there, selling things for the accomodations of the sightseers, of whom quite a number have been there to-day. The grove, composed of these kings of the forest, gray with moss and surrounded by luxuriant shrubs and young trees, looks mighty, dark and mysterious. The awful silence is interrupted by swarms of blue birds only. Here is unrolled to your gaze nature in her strength and as majestic as on the first Sabbath when creation had just been finished."

"After six hours gazing we returned to Santa Cruz with impressions of the grand and awful which can hardly be described ... In the evening there was a meeting of all the Isrselites of this city in the St. Charles Hotel. There were twenty gentlemen and nineteen ladies there."

Source: “Editorial Correspondence,” by Isaace M. Wise, Editor and Proprietor, The American Israelite [Cincinnati, Ohio], August 17, 1877.

GREAT CEASAR!

Author's Personal Collection

"Still for anyone sensitive to climatic influences, Santa Cruz would be trying; the air is generally laden with dampness, and there is a chill in it that one does not feel in San Diego, or even Santa Barbara ... One of the drives of interest is up to the grove of big trees. The road winds up a mountain grown with countless fir trees. At its base flows the San Lorenzo River quietly at first over a smooth sandy bed, but gradually, as we ascended, dashing noisily, like a true mountain stream, over the rocks. Glimpses between the trees of the clear water so far below us were beautiful, but, Great Ceasar! how narrow the road was, and sometimes we suddenly met a team – in one case a heavy wagon drawn by six oxen – and passed where I had thought there was hardly room for ourselves. The Santa Cruz trees are smaller than those at Mariposa and [Calaveras], but only small by comparison, and so accessible that many visit them, who do not see the others. They are all California ‘redwoods,’ and are veritable giants of the forest."

Source: “Land of the Big Trees – a Jaunt Across Lower California by Carriage – Santa Barbara to Santa Cruz With Glimpses of San Marcos Pass,” The Weekly Wisconsin [Milwaukee, Wisconsin], May 7, 1887.

 

 

PROMOTING THE SAN LORENZO VALLEY

Author's Personal Collection

This lovely circa 1906 Art Nouveau promotional postcard* for the Hotel Ben Lomond touts the area's most important industries and attractions.

The San Lorenzo Valley was one of California’s earliest logging regions. By the late 1860s, the valley supported twenty-two lumber mills with an annual capacity of eleven million board feet of lumber.

For many years Ben Lomond was a vibrant logging town. In the 1880s Ben Lomond began to transition into a resort community. The town’s first resort was Hotel Ben Lomond established in 1887. The original two-story structure contained thirty-five guest rooms and a wide wrap around veranda. The complex included four cottages and several changing rooms near the San Lorenzo River to accommodate bathers. Visitors were enticed with opportunities for fishing, hunting and boating. The hotel also bragged they were only two miles from the world famous Big Trees Grove.

The hotel underwent a long period of unstable management. For a couple of years, it was owned and managed by Joseph Ball, the experienced hotelier who also managed the small hotel at Big Trees Grove. The struggling hotel continued to change hands frequently. In 1914 Hotel Ben Lomond was a victim of arson for insurance purposes.

The Big Trees Grove image used on the postcard is the famous one by McKean and Reese taken during the 1888 return visit of famed explorer John Charles Frémont. The image captured the moment when Frémont along with "sixteen members of the party encircled that immense tree [the Giant], joining hands; then swinging free from it they formed in a circle apart on the cleared ground, showing the immense growth of this gigantic tree …"

* This postcard was mailed to a correspondent in Wantagh on Long Island, New York.

Sources: “The San Lorenzo Valley Flume Chronicle,” by Lisa Robinson, Redwood Logging and Conservation in the Santa Cruz Mountains: A Split History; “Curiosities: Ben Lomond-Area Resorts,” Santa Cruz Trains – Railroads of the Monterey Bay Area, https://www.santacruztrains.com/.